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In the aftermath of the December 14, 2012, mass murder of 27 presumably innocent victims at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, the mass media is predictably filled with discussion about gun control laws. When you consider the full story behind mass killings in schools, this is highly irrational and irresponsible. It is akin to discussing banning cars because of driving fatalities caused by people using prescription drugs.

This comparison is doubly apt because so many school killers were using dangerous antidepressant prescription drugs. Recent media discussion mentions that Adam Lanza, the accused shooter, may have suffered long-term mental health problems including an unspecified personality disorder and possible autism or Asperger’s syndrome.

Given how the mental health care system in the US works, it is likely that Adam Lanza was taking one or more psychiatric drugs. While many take these drugs without killing anybody, there are numerous cases in which patients with no history of violence took such drugs for even just a few days and became highly violent and committed suicide or homicide. Given what happened at Sandy Hook, it is important for authorities to investigate and reveal any medications that Adam Lanza may have been using.

Guns Are Not The Problem

Guns are not the only way to maim and kill large numbers of people. Further, they virtually never kill anybody without direct action by a person who has made the gun dangerous by misuse.

Even in China, where guns are outlawed and the government quickly stomps on anybody opposing its opinions including by military violence against its own citizens, troubled people still harm school children with ease.

On the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre, Min Yingjun is accused of attacking a group of school students walking to school using a knife. Reports claim that 22 kids and one adult were injured.
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A New York appeals court has ruled that if the US Federal government declares a “public health emergency” per the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA) then it does not have to obey state laws. Additionally, the parties who helped it forcibly provide “medical care” to those in the declared emergency area are also not liable for their actions and consequent adverse outcomes.

Quoted from Mom Loses Suit Over Daughter’s H1N1 Vaccine:

The Appellate Division concluded on Nov. 21 that PREP pre-empts state law claims. PREP contains an express pre-emption clause stating that, during a declared public health emergency, “no state … may establish, enforce or continue in effect with respect to a covered countermeasure any provision of law or legal requirement that (A) is different from, or is in conflict with, any requirement applicable under this section; and (B) related to the … use, … dispensing or administration by qualified persons of the covered countermeasure,” Peters wrote.

PREPA: Bad Law Inspired by 9/11

PREPA was passed in December 2005 during the second Bush Administration when it was signed by President George W. Bush. Like so many broken laws passed in the wake of 9/11, it does not appear there is any legal criteria that might counterbalance the potential for harm. In particular, there is no description in the law for what is required to authorize declaring a public health emergency. There is no provision for considering or evaluating dissenting views by those outside the government, either.

Quoted from Pandemic funding, liability shield clear Congress:

But Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and some other Democrats, along with consumer groups such as Public Citizen, derided the liability provision as a giveaway to the drug industry. Kennedy said the bill makes it “essentially impossible” for injured parties to sue for damages. He also argued that the measure allows the HHS secretary to use many common diseases as a reason to activate the liability shield.

“Without a real compensation program, the liability protection in the defense bill provides a Christmas present to the drug industry and bag of coal to everyday Americans,” stated a Dec 21 news release issued by Kennedy and Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Chris Dodd, D-Conn.

The liability protection language, called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, was tacked onto the end of the huge defense-spending bill (H.R. 2863).

It gives the HHS secretary authority to trigger the liability protection by declaring an emergency if he or she determines that a disease or other health threat represents an emergency or may constitute an emergency in the future. The act does not list any criteria for determining the existence of an emergency. The declaration would have to list the diseases, populations, and geographic areas covered and when the emergency would end.

Such an emergency declaration is not subject to court review, and it preempts any conflicting laws or regulations of states or local communities, the act says.

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NOTE: This collaboratively written article incorporates text by multiple authors including Rob, Alison, and Chris.

Divorce is one of the most stressful experiences most people endure, right up there with a death in the family, job loss and extended unemployment, or a medical catastrophe such as cancer. When you add to the mix a child custody battle with a Personality Disordered Abuser as your adversary, you will likely experience years of false allegations, be kicked out of your home, see your kids and family suffer the abuse of parental alienation, experience frequent misconduct by the courts, see your reputation ruined by defamation, suffer job loss and chronic underemployment or unemployment, and many other damages. During such a hellish experience, it is only natural to be depressed, anxious, and suffer chronic sleep problems. The continual stress results in what may initially appear as psychological problems but which inevitably result in physiological damage to one’s health.

Many suffering from this nightmare will seek medical help from their general practitioner or psychiatrist. At some level they know the stress-related symptoms they are experiencing are not “all in their heads” as some may claim. Sometimes medical practitioners do help, other times they begin another series of upsets to their patient’s health. That’s because the mainstream therapies used by many doctors often include too quickly prescribing common antidepressants and anxiolytic medications that have a plethora of adverse effects on health. Fortunately, there are alternatives that can often help without the need for these medications or can help to reduce the prescription medication dosages required and thereby help avert some of the worst of the side effects.

Psychotherapy Is Not A Cure

When you visit your doctor or psychiatrist and explain how you can’t sleep and are depressed and anxious from the horrors of the family law system, first of all you should realize that most of these medical practitioners don’t really understand you or your situation. Unless one has been through the nightmare of the family law courts or has seen the destruction they inflict upon a close family member or friend, it’s hard to have any real understanding of this miserable reality.

Some medical providers may brush off your request for medication, pointing out that your stress is temporary and will go away in a few months and advise you to see a psychologist or therapist. While good psychologists and therapists can certainly provide some help, what they can do is often not enough as the manifestations of the family law crisis often include physiological illness brought on by chronic stress.

Many psychotherapists simply aren’t much use in such difficult situations. First of all, for a chance of good results you must find one who has some experience with the family law system and forms of child abuse including parental alienation. If you pick a therapist who has never set foot in a family court room and seen how dysfunctional the system is, you are far less likely to get competent treatment or helpful advice.

Many psychotherapists have zero experience in family law battles. They may be experts at substance abuse, marital arguments, or helping people suffering job loss but know nothing about extreme divorce and child custody battles. Even those who do have some experience often lack a full appreciation of how abusive, arbitrary, and destructive the family law courts are to their victims and how it frequently takes nothing but an unproven false allegation to put a good parent who has broken no laws and abused nobody into a no-contact or expensive supervised visitation situation that is itself a form of emotional abuse.

Naive therapists may be operating under the mistaken impression that you can’t be kicked out of your home and have all your property and assets taken from you without a chance to present your side of the story or at least some evidence of wrongdoing. But in today’s family law courts, it is not unusual for that to happen. One lie is all it takes to ruin months or years of the lives of the falsely accused parent and his or her children. A second lie is often all it takes to amplify the damage tenfold. The general public fails to understand this, and so do most therapists.

A really excellent therapist for you should also be expertly familiar with personality disorders and sociopathic abuse patterns. Some therapists run away from personality disorder cases as fast as they can. They know how dangerous these people can be to them personally. Others are totally ignorant of how destructive personality disorders can be to the misfortunate ones who married and/or had children with a person suffering one of the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B personality disorders including Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Antisocial personality disorders. Ideally, you want a therapist who knows a lot about personality disorders and is brave enough to help you face off with one of these people. “Brave” applies here because it is common for the Personality Disordered Abuser to seek to defame and even file complaints seeking to revoke the license of a therapist who dares to challenge their abusive behaviors or help their victims.

Unfortunately, finding a suitable therapist is often very difficult to do. For many people, joining a high conflict divorce or parental alienation support group or web discussion forum and asking for referrals from the people there may be one of the few realistic means they have to find a therapist who might be of some help.

If you are fortunate enough to find a good therapist familiar with family court abuse, you are likely to get some useful support and advice that may help you weather the long storm. But even when you have found a good therapist and are starting to build some rapport, the odds are strong that by then you will be suffering physiological symptoms of extreme stress that even an excellent therapist cannot resolve. Lots of talk therapy isn’t enough on its own to turn around severe depression, anxiety, or sleep disorders. Realizing this, you’ll probably go back to your doctor again looking for medical help.

Psychiatric Medicines Are Not Panaceas or Candy

After hearing that you’ve got a psychotherapist and are still suffering, even conservative doctors are going to whip out the prescription pad if they haven’t already. They are likely to quickly prescribe an antidepressant, an anxiolytic, and possibly a sleep medication from their list of favorites. Every doctor has favorite meds, ones they have used for years or new ones they want to try because they got a box full of samples or a fancy $100 surf ‘n turf dinner, golf outing, or a week long tropical vacation in the dead of winter from a big pharma rep pushing a lucrative new pill. So what you will be prescribed may often have little or nothing to do with what will actually work.
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If you’ve been going through a nasty divorce or child custody battle that has lasted years, it’s likely you have experienced a great deal of chronic stress. Years of such stress can create devastating health problems that are often misunderstood and inadequately treated. The stress of dealing with a high-conflict co-parent is particularly likely to badly damage a person’s health as the troubles often continue until well after the children grow into adulthood. But often medical professionals treat these problems as merely mental health issues when in fact there has been significant physiological to the body. This article points out some of the common symptoms of the physiological damage and refers you to additional reading on medical tests that can help you determine appropriate treatment for such conditions.

Personality Disorders and “High Conflict Personalities” Can Cause Severe Mental and Medical Damage

Parents who are dealing with a person who appears to suffer from a personality disorder such as Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, Antisocial, or Paranoid personality disorders are particularly prone to devastating health effects. Often these people engage in parental alienation child abuse such as by blocking the children from contact with a capable or loving parent and trying to force the children to hate that parent. The children are clearly being abused along with the target parent. It’s entirely possible that the young ones will develop mental and physiological injuries from this abuse, too.

Some are literally driven to their deaths by years of abuse. A few even commit suicide to escape it. Others end up on work disability and require expensive medical care for many years. Yet for them, the symptoms still linger for even decades because often medical professionals treat these people as if they are simply suffering from “major depression” or “generalized anxiety disorder” when in fact they are physiologically very ill and in need of medical care, not just counseling and psychotherapy.

Common Symptoms of Physiological Damage from Chronic Stress

The following symptoms are often signs of long-term damage to the stress management systems in the body. Every one of them can result from damage to the adrenal glands after they have been forced to pump out vast quantities of cortisol for years trying to help you cope with the ex’s harassment and attacks.
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The US Senate is at its typical deceitful antics again. Senators are once again debating more repressive legislation, this time in the form of the Food Safety Accountability Act of 2010. This legislation is designed in part to silence those who cite research on foods and supplements that have beneficial effects to health. The main sponsor of the legislation, Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat from Vermont), claims he’s trying to protect Americans from unsafe contaminants in foods and supplements. But the legislation is so defective that, if passed, it will almost certainly be used by the FDA to continue to attack, persecute, and shut down companies and organizations that publish citations of scientific research that shows their food and supplement products are beneficial.

If after reading this article you are persuaded that this new legislation has some problems and should not pass in its present form, please take action by contacting your Senators to oppose the bill. It takes just a couple of minutes to do this.

FDA Happy to Sacrifice Your Health, Life, and Freedom for Its Money and Power

Why does the FDA want to silence these people? Simple, they are a threat to its income and influence.

Innovative food and supplement companies sell a wide variety of highly beneficial products that often out-perform expensive and side-effect laden drugs at a fraction of the cost. The FDA would rather have you buying the latest and greatest statin drug to lower your LDL cholesterol, not eating healthy foods and taking cheap and effective supplements like niacin, plant sterols, red yeast rice, and fiber supplements that all have scientific backing for lowering LDL cholesterol without the dangerous side effects of statins.

Why does the FDA prefer statins? Again, follow the money. Statin makers are big pharmaceutical companies. They pay billions in fees to the FDA to approve these drugs. The FDA is addicted to these fees. While the drug companies “complain” about the high fees, they are actually very happy to participate in this plot because it enables them to introduce pricey new products every year, many of which work not much differently from the dozens of similar products already on the market, and keep smaller competitors from cutting into their markets. The FDA is a very good business partner in that it helps create drug monopolies and destroy any competition that may arrive before it can take too big a cut out of big pharma and FDA profits.

Small companies can’t afford $1 billion plus drug approval processes that take several years, even more than a decade, to get a drug approved. So many small companies that want to offer consumers products to help solve their health problems have turned to foods and supplements as the only route available to them.
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One of our readers has alerted us to a San Diego fraud story involving “Doctor” Lawrence Stowe of Stowe BioTherapy in La Mesa, California, and his allegedly fradulent practice of medicine. The reader has likened it to the case of San Diego’s Stephen Doyne, Ph.D., the psychologist in ill repute for his dishonest credentials from diploma mills as well as his alleged violations of California family law and abuses against children and parents. While Doyne has many San Diego area judges and lawyers helping to protect him and their alleged collusion to commit fraud on desperate parents, Stowe had no such powerful government criminals helping him and themselves to the profit from fraud on desperate patients.

Stowe has been responsible for conducting sales pitches for “blood stem cell therapy” for serious illnesses, including ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He talked potential patients into $100,000+ treatments that have no scientific legitimacy in part by misrepresenting his credentials and affiliations as well as the scientific basis. He would get them to agree to go to Monterrey, Mexico, to be treated by “Dr.” Frank Morales. Morales never completed his residency and his medical diploma from a failed Caribbean medical school that was shut down for selling diplomas. The hospital where he was “treating” patients was not aware he was using unapproved treatments at the time 60 Minutes conducted an in-depth investigation.
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On July 29, 2010, the British Medical Journal published a flawed study of the usage of calcium supplements and associated risk of heart attack. The study misleadingly concluded that use of calcium supplements increases the risk of heart attacks by 27% and has no significant effect on overall mortality. The authors advise that the use of calcium supplements in treating or preventing osteoporosis should be reconsidered. Some in the media are broadcasting this study as a reason to stop using calcium supplements.

Please don’t stop your calcium supplements before reading more about the serious flaws in this study!

A major problem with this study is that it excluded people taking vitamin D, magnesium, and other common ingredients in bone protection products. As a result, the study participants generally had low levels of nutrients that are associated with lower risk of diseases such as atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease and are directly tied how calcium is used in the body. These nutrients all work together to keep calcium in the bones where it belongs, rather than building up calcium deposits in the vascular system and heart that can contribute to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.
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Nursing infants should be able to spend quality time, including overnights, with their fathers. Yet some mothers try to use nursing as an excuse to block contact between infants and their dads. Courts should be fully aware that there are plentiful means to ensure a good supply of breast milk for use by fathers caring for infants.

Robert Franklin of Fathers & Families recently penned the posting Expert: No Conflict Between Breastfeeding and Shared Parenting about an article from a breastfeeding advocate who claims fathers are trying to assert in court that breastfeeding is inappropriate behavior:

(Breastfeeding Court Letter, by Katherine A Dettwyler, Ph.D., Anthropology)

In addition, my research has been used to counter charges of child abuse and “inappropriate parenting behaviors” in many court cases, especially involving divorce and custody disputes, where fathers may accuse the mother of “inappropriate parenting by virtue of extended breastfeeding” as a strategy to gain custody of children, or may simply claim that ‘continued breastfeeding’ is not relevant to shared custody arrangements.

At this point (2005), all of the research that has been conducted on the health and cognitive consequences of different lengths of breastfeeding shows steadily increasing benefits the longer a child is breastfed up to the age of 2 years, and no negative consequences. No research has been conducted on the physical, emotional, or psychological health of children breastfed longer than 2 years. Thus, while there is no research-based proof that breastfeeding a child for 3 years provides statistically significant health or cognitive benefits compared to breastfeeding a child for only two years, there is no research to show that breastfeeding a child for 3 years (or 4-5-6-7-8-9 years) causes any sort of physical, psychological or emotional harm to the child. This has recently been confirmed in the 2005 American Academy of Pediatrics “Recommendations for breastfeeding the healthy term infant” (see below).

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The FDA misled consumers for years about the protection conferred by sunscreen products. Their flawed SPF rating system disregarded the risk of skin damage from UV-A light, the type of UV light most likely to penetrate deep into the skin and cause damage. Old product labels usually disclosed only UV-B protection, mentioning nothing about UV-A and UV-C light. While new product labels on many sun protection products have recently started to disclose the type of UV light against which protection is effective, fundamental weaknesses with sunscreens remain. Consumers often do not apply enough sunscreen or fail to apply it to areas that will receive significant sun exposure. For instance, a white T-shirt may let through a large amount of UV light yet many people will only apply their sunscreen to exposed bare skin. Even when properly applied, perspiration and water exposure can cause the protection to be uneven and incomplete.

In recent years, a few companies have introduced products that allow consumers to gain the benefit of significant sun protection from oral supplements that cause protection to be distributed throughout the skin. One such product is Life Extension’s Enhanced FernBlock with Sendara.
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We sometimes get emails from our readers asking about the mix of information on our web site. Some readers wonder why we write about topics that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Many of our readers are interested in the family law abuse and judicial corruption stories, others appreciate the coverage of health topics, and yet others find the stories about police abuse tactics match their own experiences. But what do they all have in common? The answer is they are all tied together by the involvement of government in abusing its duties to the public to uphold the law, avoiding conflicts of interest and bias, and staying away from corruption. In this article, I’ll be comparing examples of what I’ve learned about the abusive conduct of the FDA with the abusive conduct of family law courts. They are both excellent examples of how the United States has strayed a long distance down a very dark road that leads to becoming an abusive totalitarian state that views its citizens as slaves to be controlled for its own profit and power.

Violating Civil and Human Rights For Job Security, Power, and Profit

We prominently feature stories of abuse, corruption, and persecution by out of control government intent on building job security and power by crushing opponents and inventing fictional “crimes” and “crises” to “justify” their abuses and budgets. They commonly do all of this and more not only in violation of the law but also against any reasonable norm for moral and ethical behaviors for governments and government employees. While our readers may be familiar with the pattern of government abuse and corruption in their own experiences or those of family and friends who have been badly harmed by it, they may not be familiar with similar trangressions in other areas.
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